Unit 2 - CMS Development and Design

I chose the theme article "LibData to LibCMS: One Library's Evolutionary Pathway to a Content Management System" by Paul F. Bramscher and John T. Butler from the Digital Library Development Lab at the University of Minnesota. The article describes there journey from a simple relational database for storing library related data to an increasingly more dynamic and flexible content management system. While the technical and functional details of the CMS they ultimately ended up with were somewhat interesting, I was really struck more by the strong commitment to both user-driven design and local, open-source development.

One of their overarching goals was that a CMS "should enable the organization to provide a high degree of customization for users so that key user communities feel that the site has been designed expressly for them." The authors were very honest about the trade-offs of a centralized CMS, especially concerns over loss of freedom and creative license for staff and individual departments. In exchange, however, the university was able to empower staff lacking HTML skills to take more direct control over the content of their own websites. To help off-set staff concerns, very careful attention was paid to understanding existing workflows and roles in practice (not ideally) prior to any technical development of the system itself. Moreover, increasing amounts of flexibility and multiple authoring mechanisms were built into the system throughout its evolution.

The authors also frankly discuss the pros and cons of local development and make it clear that the decision between that and purchasing proprietary software is really a decision unique to an individual institutional.  While like many organizations they were challenged by the gap between library and computer science knowledge and skills, ultimately they found the bonuses of local development to outweigh the drawbacks. Namely, they prioritized the complete technical control to design a system that met the specific individual needs of the university and integrated as seamlessly as possible with existing university systems while proving cheaper in the long-term and avoiding restrictive licensing agreements. Moreover, there was a hope that the open-source approach would eventually lead to shared community use and development in the future.

I do have one rather petty and insignificant criticism of the article. I generally think the purpose of an analogy is to compare one thing a person is likely to already have an understanding of to a similar thing a person perhaps is unfamiliar with as a means of helping a person more quickly or easily grasp a new concept. So please tell me, what is the purpose here of using this analogy: "This [system] approach may be roughly analogized to arranging DNA nucleotides in chains to produce an 'information molecule'." Did the authors forget who their target audience was momentarily or is it just me?